by Ninie Hammon
“I busy.”
“Do what Mommy tells you.”
Was it Charlie’s imagination, or was the three-year-old determined not to do what she was told? Did that mean she was spoiled? No. Spoiled kids got whatever they wanted and nobody ever told them no. That wasn’t a definition of Merrie’s life. Okay, not spoiled, stubborn. Yeah. She sighed. You could do something about spoiled, but stubborn went all the way to the bone.
“Who’s dis?”
Merrie had approached and reluctantly started picking up papers. She held out a photograph that had been in the box with them. Charlie took it, glanced at it before she dropped it in the … Her eyes snapped back.
The picture showed three children — three gap-toothed little kids, which meant they all were six or seven years old and missing key teeth in front. Two little girls and a little boy. One of the little girls had flaming red hair. The little boy’s hair was black. She settled down on the floor to study the picture, a smile of recognition growing on her face. It was a picture of her and Sam and Malachi. Where had the three of them been when the picture was taken? She didn’t remember. They had wide grins on their faces and were standing in the dirt in front of a shack.
A piece of a memory fluttered through her mind and was done. An old woman with white hair and a face wrinkled like a witch. Her teeth were blackened stumps, like a forest after a fire. Her eyes were alive, though, bright, blue and fierce. Frightening. Her fingers were gnarled and lumpy, grasping Charlie’s arm. Her palm was lined with deep grooves when she held out her hand. In it was a jewel.
Chapter Seven
E.J. Hamilton, Dr. E.J. Hamilton, stepped into the small bathroom in the corridor of the Healthy Pets Veterinary Clinic and Animal Hospital, closed the door behind him, took a deep breath, shut his eyes and tried to calm down.
This was insane. Insane. He was a veterinarian. A vet. He treated animals — dogs, cats, cows, pigs, horses, even the occasional exotic pet like the python the little Donaldson boy had. Or the iguana that got loose in the office, ran out into the waiting room and right up Dorothy Prudell’s leg. Dorothy’d grabbed it and held it out to him. “Lose something?” While the one-eyed cat she’d brought in for shots hissed and spit and looked like one of those cartoon cats that were really witches’ familiars.
E.J. stepped to the sink, turned on the water, cupped his hands in it and rubbed the cool water on his face. He looked at his reflection in the mirror above the sink, water dripping off his chin, and he looked every bit as stressed out as he felt. Why would anybody want him to treat their ailments — if he’d seen the look that was on his face right now on anybody else, he wouldn’t have trusted that person to change the oil in his tractor.
Right now, there were three people out there in the waiting room. Not people bringing him their pets. People bringing him their infected toenails, their mysterious pain in the groin — dear Lord, what might that be? And Grace Tibbits, who traveled twice a week to Carlisle for dialysis because her kidneys didn’t function anymore. If the Jabberwock kept the county locked up, she’d be dead inside a week. Probably sooner.
If the Jabberwock …
It wasn’t an “if” for E.J. And he couldn’t have said why that was or when he had come to that conclusion. It might even have been the day he’d loaded up what could not have been a more disparate assortment of humanity into his van and traveled to the county line to see it, the thing that had been hurling people into the Middle of Nowhere all that morning.
He’d stood a bit off to the side, examining the shimmer as Liam tossed a rock through it. Something clicked in his head as he studied it, snapped shut with such finality he was surprised the others hadn’t heard it. His mind often worked like that, leapt out in front of his reason and came to a conclusion. It was always a conclusion his mind came to eventually, working its slow way through a labyrinth of logical sequencing. Often when he ‘figured something out” he was merely acknowledging the truth his mind had already told him. This thing, this Jabberwock, wasn’t going to disappear by tomorrow morning. Wouldn’t be gone the next day either. Maybe not even the next. He certainly didn’t know what it was or where it had come from, but he was unswervingly confident that he knew where it was going — nowhere anytime soon.
And because it wasn’t, there would continue to be a steady stream of humans, homo sapiens, in the lobby of his animal hospital — animal hospital — awaiting his care. Sure, a few basic principles applied across species. But nobody was asking him to treat a mountain lion instead of a tabby cat. They were asking him to treat a little girl who had a rash and maybe it was measles. He had no idea what a measles rash looked like. Dobermans didn’t get measles.
If it hadn’t been for Sam Sheridan, he’d have … yeah, he’d have what? Run away? Sam did understand human anatomy, she did know about dispensing medications and all manner of other people things E.J. didn’t. She was way more the doctor here than he was. She should have been in charge instead of E.J., who had won the captain-of-the-ship lottery by virtue of two letters in front of his name: Dr.
So Sam was only an assistant, just “helping.” Like that snot-nosed O’Conner kid who claimed to be in his second year of medical school — home with a broken leg he’d gotten skiing. E.J. was convinced the kid was conning his parents, that he wasn’t even in medical school, but he did bring to the table a supply of “people” medical books that he’d brought home from school. Those books now filled a shelf in E.J.’s office — like he really had time right now to read them. But they were at least a resource, to look up basic things like, oh, I don’t know, the location of the human appendix, for example. Dogs and cats had no appendix, though the cecum served as an admirable substitute. In about the same position in the abdomen. About.
Bottom line: E.J. Hamilton was in way over his head. He could sew up a cut finger on a person just like he could on a cat’s paw, but the human patients he was being asked to diagnose and treat … It was crazy.
“E.J., you okay in there?” Sam called through the door.
“No.”
He hit the handle on the toilet and flushed it, then opened the door to face her. “But you found me so I’ll have to find a better place to hide next time.”
She put her hand on his arm. Didn’t say anything, just stood there. That steadied him.
“Grace Tibbits is in Exam One. Kinda for the same reason you were in the bathroom. Hiding. Her family is not taking what’s happening to her well.”
“And you want me to talk to them? Seriously? I have never had to help a dog accept that its mother is dying and I don’t think I’d be any good at it.”
Raylynn Bennett called out from the reception desk down the hall. “Judd Perkins is on the phone, says he needs to talk to you.”
That gave E.J. the escape he was looking for and he headed for his office. “I’ll take it in here, Raylynn.”
When he picked up the phone, Judd didn’t even say hello, just told him: “Something’s wrong with Buster.”
“What seems to be the trouble?”
Judd began to explain, but at that moment there was a flurry of activity outside in the waiting room and Sam opened his door without knocking. “Becky Sue Potter’s here. In early labor. I need your help.”
Help delivering a baby!
He let that settle for a beat.
Not a litter of kittens. Not a foal or a lamb or a calf. A baby!
“You listening to me?” Judd asked.
“Yeah, sure, Judd. Don’t worry about it. Buster’ll be fine. If he’s still not eating tomorrow morning, bring him in and I’ll take a look at him.”
“But what about the chicken?”
“What chicken?”
“The chicken Buster killed this morning.”
E.J. could hear Becky Sue in the waiting room, moaning.
“I don’t do dead-chicken resurrections.” E.J. slammed the phone down as Becky Sue let out another cry that at least sounded a little like a cow giving birth. There was that.
It wasn’t until later — after Sam had determined that Becky Sue’s baby was not coming today and sent her home, after he’d watched Sam take Reece Tibbits outside for a talk, after he’d sewn up Bud Crocket’s finger and put ointment on what was probably poison ivy, probably, on Asa Morgan’s arm — that E.J. took a breath and thought about Buster and the chicken.
Buster had killed a chicken this morning?
Buster was a big, gentle Great Pyrenees that E.J.’d treated for an infected toenail a couple of years ago. Knew it had to hurt, but the dog hadn’t made a sound.
Buster killed a chicken.
Wouldn’t touch his kibble but killed a chicken.
“… doing stupid stuff like chewing on rocks …”
E.J. had just gotten seated in his office chair with a cup of fresh coffee that was actually hot, unlike the three cups that’d gotten cold because he’d left them sitting somewhere, when he remembered the rocks part. He got up and went to his filing cabinet, pulled out the drawer and thumbed through the files until he came to the letter P.
Paltrow, Partridge, Pendergrass, Perkins …
He pulled out the chart and ran his finger down the medical history. Then he flipped back to the front page and scanned it again, ran his finger slowly down the list of vaccinations.
Buster had had every one of his shots.
Except one.
E.J. found the phone number at the top of the chart, picked up the phone and called Judd back. Judd didn’t answer. He tried again, let it ring and ring. No answer.
“Raylynn, I’m going out for a while,” he called out to her. “I’ll be back in about an hour.”
E.J. Hamilton was a veterinarian. No, not a doctor, but he was a vet. A good one. The shot Buster was supposed to have taken eighteen months ago but didn’t was his rabies booster.
Chapter Eight
Viola Tackett watched Malachi disappear into the veterinary clinic, though she was reasonably sure he did not need to come in today to get Sam Sheridan to change the bandage on his wound.
But she’d brought him and dropped him off because he’d asked her to. He seemed better, not so distant, since J-Day, when he’d refused to go home with her when Neb come to get her, stayed to help out, was determined to be a hero.
And what’d it get him? A bullet, that’s what. When Viola heard that scrawny little Clayton girl had shot her Malachi — well, it was a good thing for her that her head exploded. ‘Cause what Viola woulda done to her if she’d got her hands on the girl woulda been a whole lot worse than that.
As she was bumping along beside Neb on her way home that afternoon, still feeling woozy from whatever it was that thing done to her — the Jabberwock thing — she was already planning. Viola had an intuition about some things. It was that had got her out of trouble with the law all these years, kinda knowing … not what was gonna happen exactly, just a sense that something was going to. That sense had sent her hauling butt away from marijuana patches right before the DEA showed up in their little bug-green helicopters. It’d kept her from getting involved in that deal with them meth-heads. They’d wanted to go in together and she’d said no, while Neb, Obie and Zach was crapping their pants wanting her to say yes. Them meth-heads was undercover cops, and they’d all been in the iron house if she hadn’t followed her gut.
Her gut was telling her that the mirage thingy out on the road at the county line wasn’t some … what’d they call it? An atmospheric phenomenon or such as that. Her gut was saying it wasn’t gonna blow out of the county quick as it blew in. It was telling her that this was the opportunity of a lifetime.
She understood that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities really did come along only once in a lifetime. And if you didn’t drop your beer on the floor, jump up and invite Opportunity in soon’s it knocked on your door, it was like to go to the neighbors and see did they welcome it.
Just suppose that Jabberwock thing hung around, didn’t go poof in a puff of smoke. Suppose it kept folks from coming and going in and out of Nowhere County for a long time. Suppose it never went away. What did that mean?
It meant that Viola Tackett had just been handed her own little kingdom.
Her head had been spinning with plans every waking moment since. She had to be smart, though. Play her cards right. Not make her move until she had all her ducks beak-to-tail-feathers.
She’d borrowed the Martins’ old Chevrolet this morning to come into town, so wouldn’t none of the boys have to ride in the “sunshine seats” in the back of Viola’s remaining pickup truck or in the truck they used for hauling. The Martins lived at the bottom of the hollow and had a telephone. They was good folks. Their girl May Ella and Neb had a thing when they’s young. She was even uglier than he was, had that dish face, all mashed in so her chin stuck out far as her nose. Good thing she kept her knees together because Viola didn’t think that boy’s git was likely to be any smarter than he was. The oldest of her four sons was the dumbest, but not by much. Neb never even learned how to spell his own name. Went to school through fifth grade and never learned that much. Nebuchadnezzar was a mouthful, she’d grant, and she wished she’d named him something different because it did hurt his feelings that he couldn’t spell it. Neb got fat before he was twenty-five and that Cunningham boy who lived on Owl Creek Road come courting on May Ella. The two of them had a yard full of kids, last Viola’d heard. Neb’d had a hard row-to-row trying to compete — ugly, fat and stupid was a tough combination to overcome when you’s trying to win a woman. The fat part was Neb’s own fault. He brought it on himself eating all kinda junk food — Moon Pies and Ho Hos and Ding Dongs that he got at Tucker’s Grocery in Killarney.
Junk food like he’d brought home from that little job she’d sent him and Obie to do last week. That boy’d cleaned out every speck of candy he could find on the premises and a case of RC Cola along with what she’d sent them to steal. She’d have kicked his butt over it, but it might actually have helped with their cover. Wouldn’t be long now before she wouldn’t need to be sneaking around, though. Not long before she could do whatever she wanted right out in the open. Only had to set another couple of ducks in place. Viola Tackett was on the move.
“Does that hurt?” Sam asked.
“Yeah, it hurts!” Malachi made a face like he was in agony.
“Seriously?”
“I’d rather be scalped.”
“I didn’t mean ‘Does it hurt when I pull the tape off?’ Of course it hurts then, with all that hair …” But Sam did not want to get into a discussion about the amount of hair on Malachi Tackett’s chest. Nope. Definitely did not want to go there. “I meant—”
“The bullet hole is healing nicely,” he said. “Maybe needs a Band-Aid.” He stopped her before she could interrupt. “Okay, two Band-Aids. One for the entrance wound, one for the exit wound. But you do know that’s going to mess with my Get Out of Jail Free card.”
She nodded, acknowledging the mutual charade. Unless he got a ride to the clinic — his mother and brothers had dropped him off this morning on their way to the grocery store — he’d be stuck on a mountainside with nobody to talk to except his totally dysfunctional family. She’d figured out two weeks ago that staying to help out after his Jabberwock ride — and then trying to save Merrie McClintock from Abby Clayton — had begun a healing in Malachi that she neither understood nor questioned.
As she eased the tape up off his skin — though it would probably have hurt less if she’d just yanked it off — she stole glances at his face, noting how haunted his eyes still looked. The young man who had returned to Nowhere County right before Christmas from war — Sam didn’t even know where or who was fighting — was not the same man who’d left. Not that she knew that man particularly well. It wasn’t like Sam had spent time with Malachi on the few occasions when he had come home over the years on leave. And she certainly never bumped into him on the street. The Tacketts had lived for generations in the mountains around the little town of Killarney in Turkey Neck Hollow. Dee
p down in the southeastern part of the county, it wasn’t a place you went to unless you intended to go there — and they knew you and knew you were coming. You didn’t just happen to pass through on your way somewhere else. There was no somewhere else.
The only time Sam had ever been there had been four years before, and she had gone at the express invitation of Viola Tackett. It was the last time she’d seen Malachi when he was … still Malachi.
The Tackett house was a log cabin deep back in the woods at the end of a gravel road that wound up the side of a mountain. It looked old and tired and well used. Viola’s boys — they’d always be her “boys” — still lived at home, which was a bit odd since they were certainly old enough to find a girl and get married and move out. But none of the others had and Malachi was home so seldom he didn’t need his own place.
Viola’s daughter, Esther Ruth, Essie, had Down syndrome and the two older boys, Neb and Obie, were … slow. Sam didn’t know what the politically correct term for that was anymore, probably not “mildly retarded” — they just weren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. They all looked like their mother, with big, blunt features, wide mouths and deep sunken eyes beneath thick, black eyebrows. The third brother, Zach, was a couple of rungs higher on the intellectual scale than his brothers, had made it almost all the way through high school.
Of course, Sam knew Viola and her boys were engaged in illegal business ventures. There were rumors of a chop shop off Rabbit Run Road, and they had stills all over the mountains. Of course, half the people in Nowhere County had a still. The Tacketts raised weed, were the drug connection for any and all narcotic and addictive substances, fenced stolen property, and were party to uglier, meaner, darker activities that folks only whispered about.
Sam had received a call from Eunice Martin, who lived at the bottom of the mountain below the Tacketts and whose telephone was the Tacketts’ connection to the world. Eunice had said Viola needed Sam to “come tend to Neb” because he’d been bitten by a spider — black widow or brown recluse.
